Alcatraz / July 10, 2009

The island received its name in 1775 when Spanish explorer Juan Manuel de Ayala charted the San Francisco Bay, and named this tiny speck of land La Isla de los Alcatraces, which translated to "Island of the Pelicans." The small uninhabited island had little to offer, with its swift currents, minimal vegetation, and barren ground.

Long before Alcatraz became the nation's most notorious penitentiary in 1934, it was the first and largest military fortification on the Pacific Coast of the United States. Between 1859 and 1934, the island evolved from a defensive fort to a military prison and eventually to a federal penitentiary. Alcatraz was a prison almost from the very beginning. In 1859, 11 soliders scheduled for confinement in the sally port basement arrived with the Fort's first permanent garrison. During the Civil War era, soliders convicted of desertion, theft, assault, rape, and murder; citizens accused of treason; and the crew of a Confederate ship were imprisoned here. The army also used Alcatraz as a place of incarceration for Hopi, Apache, and Modoc Indians captured during the various Indian wars of the mid- to late nineteenth century and for military convicts during the Spanish-American War (1898).

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the newly created Bureau of Prisons became interested in the island as a place for a high-profile, maximum-security facility. Transferred from the War Department to the Department of Justice, Alcatraz reopened in 1934 as a federal penitentiary. Of the 1,545 men who did time on Alcatraz, only a handful were notorious - among them, Al "Scarface" Capone, "Doc" Barker, Alvin "Creepy" Karpis, George "Machine Gun" Kelly, Floyd Hamilton, and Robert Stroud, the "Birdman of Alcatraz" (who actually conducted his famous bird studies when he was imprisoned at Leavenworth.) Most of the inmates were men who had proved to be problems in other prison populations - escape risks and troublemakers.

Of the 14 attempted federal prison-era escapes, the best known occurred in June 1962, when Frank Morris and brothers John and Clarence Anglin slipped into the water. They used raincoats as flotation devices and were presumably bound for San Francisco. Although their bodies were never found, they are assumed to have drowned. In total, 36 prisoners tried to escape the Rock; all but five were recaptured or otherwise accounted for.